Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

— and if disorders of reason follow the abuse of reasoning.

Minds that bend the rule in good faith and solely through their clumsiness in handling and applying it. Who call their irascibility, sensitivity. Even concupiscibility has no right to this title; and bad humor would lay claim to it?

Theology was followed by politico-logy; and we also have a poetico-logy. His bitter zeal for good taste.

Beginnings of thoughts, simple indications, mentions suffice for the uses of life.

Oh! how difficult it is indeed to put into a sentence only the truth it needs! and to put in the truth it needs!

For the ears of the deaf and for hard ears, cries are needed.

There are words and beauties that are born of the pen. But...

On this side of and below true beauty is charm, which is a shadow of it. After them, it comes first.

Isocrates did well to live and grow old making his celebrated panegyric. What better could he do? One must never regret the time that was needed to do well what one has done.

Whoever does not satisfy his own mind in what depends on the mind will never perfectly satisfy the minds of others.

Make what is a vice in others a quality in you.

February 4.

All things that are easy to say well have been perfectly said.

All languages roll gold.

Diction in eloquence rolls its waves like rivers. But in poetry there is more art. Jets, cascades, sheets, plays of words of every kind are carefully arranged there. I speak of plays of words as one speaks of the play of waters, the waters play.

T126.These are technical names for anger-proneness and the capacity for desire, respectively. Both are distinguished from sensibilité, rendered sensitivity. Even the latter faculty is denied that name before the question about bad humor. The detached Who preserves the relative continuation and the comma before sensitivity remains.

T127.The invented formations retain the shared ending and the printed internal hyphens. They are not silently replaced by politics and poetics. His bitter zeal is a nominal fragment with no supplied name.

T128.The first exclamation excludes anything beyond the truth needed in the sentence; the second asks for that needed truth actually to be present. Repeating the formulation preserves Joubert’s distinction rather than treating the second clause as redundant.

T129.Hard ears keeps the bodily adjective used for ears that do not readily hear. It also allows the rhetorical suggestion of unresponsive listeners without replacing the source’s two groups with a diagnosis.

T130.The printed French shifts from singular beauté to plural elles. The English retains them rather than silently correcting it to her or it. Charm is thus after them in rank, though the plural antecedent is not resolved.

T348.An enlarged facsimile confirms plural elles after singular beauté; the grammatical shift remains. The right edge partly clips en; restored.

T131.The rolling image is retained before the next paragraph develops rivers, waves, jets, cascades, and sheets of water. Gold suggests the precious material borne by language; no named river is supplied.

T132.Diction renders élocution as verbal expression in eloquence, not merely voice training. Joubert explicitly compares jeux de mots with water’s play. Plays of words and play of waters keep that comparison; the phrase is not reduced to puns. Jets, cascades, and sheets preserve the forms of moving water. The final comma and repeated play follow the source.